Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Information Isn't Knowledge

The information age creates the illusion of knowledge where none exists. Dots on a map signify towns but how accurate is it? Is the town inhabited? A dot on a page isn't the same as knowledge.

Information is raw. By itself it is useless. Hence the argument that information wants to be free. Alone it has relatively little value.

In many ways, information is like iron in the earth. In the ground it is not very useful. Only after you mine it, smelt it, hammer it and temper it, can iron ore become steel. No one questions the value of steel, but anyone can question the value of unmined iron.

Knowledge is applied information. It's when you take information and arrange it in a useful way or when you combine it with something else to create something useful. Knowledge is what you get after you process information.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking your gigabytes of information are the same as knowledge. Find ways to apply it, combine it, process it and adapt it into knowledge -- then it becomes valuable.